CHAPTER FOUR PLURAL ACROSS INFLECTION AND DERIVATION, FUSION AND AGGLUTINATION Francesco Gardani Whereas contact-induced morphological change is not rare in word forma- tion, it is exceptional in inflection. Inflectional borrowing is distinguished from mere quotation of foreign forms and unambiguously acknowledged when inflectional morphemes are attached to native lexemes of the recip- ient language and have maintained their original meaning. The paper shows that the category of nominal plural has a higher-than-average bor- rowing rating. This is explained, on the one hand, by the fact that plural in the NP is a prototypical category of inherent morphology (inherent inflection is more similar to derivation than contextual inflection and derivation is more easily borrowable than inflection), and, on the other hand, by the fact that in most cases the nominal plural markers copied show prototypical properties of agglutinative rather than fusional inflec- tion such as biuniqueness and morphotactic transparency (properties of agglutination are claimed to foster borrowing). Empirical cross-linguistic evidence is provided. 1 Introduction The question of whether or not grammatical elements of one language can become part of another language’s system has received considerable attention in contact linguistics research. After decades of mostly data-poor debates on the penetrability of gram- matical systems, the turning point in the ijield was achieved by Weinreich (1953), who criticized retentionist explanations (e.g. Meillet 1921) but, at the same time, rejected the extreme diffusionist position that transfer is unconstrained (e.g. Schuchardt 1884). Since then, research has focused on the borrowability of grammatical material and patterns, developed frequency-based borrowing scales (e.g. Thomason and Kaufmann 1988), and put forward implicational hierarchies and constraints on borrowing (e.g. Moravcsik 1978, 99–114; Field 2002, 40–48).